[HN Gopher] Developer, you may need a co-founder in marketing
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Developer, you may need a co-founder in marketing
Author : raunometsa
Score : 119 points
Date : 2021-09-16 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (microfounder.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (microfounder.com)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| We know.
|
| But geek profiles and marketing profiles have often huge
| differences in life styles, ethics, rhythm, objectives, etc.
|
| It was visible at university, it's still is in social life and
| work life.
|
| Diversity enrich your life up to a point, after which cost/ratio
| plummet. I rarely see those profiles going along and having fun
| sharing time together. It's not impossible, but it's not common,
| so you won't get a lot of co-founders that will match, or that
| did, but will last.
|
| It's not that geek are completely oblivious to their shortcoming.
| _jal wrote:
| > I rarely see those profiles going along and having fun
| sharing time together.
|
| I (resident of North America) rarely see kangaroos.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| So, create my start up in australia? Got it!
| LanceJones wrote:
| There are some of us out there... I've learned to write code
| for basic apps (web scrapers in Python, Slack integration in
| PHP) but I spend most of my days as a product marketer. I love
| working with software engineers but won't ever be one myself. I
| know what I'm good at but I can appreciate those other skills.
| Zababa wrote:
| > Diversity enrich your life up to a point, after which
| cost/ratio plummet.
|
| This is a really important point that lots of people seem to
| forget when talking about the strength of diversity.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Optimise for picking a marketer that believes in the vision and
| uses the product themselves instead of someone who has a proven
| record of making sales and you'll get along just fine.
|
| Don't trade money for values.
| [deleted]
| clarge1120 wrote:
| No doubt.
|
| Developer, you also may need to learn marketing. Here's why. A
| co-founder is your first fanatical customer. Without that first
| fan, your work will go unnoticed. To gain that first fan, you
| need to learn how to do a few things well:
|
| 1. Create a One-Liner that tells the primary reason your offering
| needs to exist and be adopted by your customer. 2. Associate each
| Feature with a Benefit, all pointing back to the One-Liner. 3.
| Create a Landing Page that proves 1 and 2.
|
| So, after your offering is ready for people (preferably before,
| TBH), get 1, 2, and 3 in place.
| boplicity wrote:
| > 1. Create a One-Liner that tells the primary reason your
| offering needs to exist and be adopted by your customer. 2.
| Associate each Feature with a Benefit, all pointing back to the
| One-Liner. 3. Create a Landing Page that proves 1 and 2.
|
| As an experienced marketer, all I can say is the above is very,
| very, very good advice. Just do that and you'll be ahead of
| most people.
|
| Simplicity, clarity, benefits, and focus. It works.
|
| Much of the work I do, in terms of marketing, is figuring out
| that "one liner" and then explaining how everything else fits
| under, and supports, that one-liner-umbrella.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| If as developer you find a sales/marketing cofounder that's
| really putting in the work, you are golden.
|
| I have partnered a few times with sales guys but they all quickly
| lost interest once it became clear that they would have to put in
| a lot of work without any immediate payback.
| realPubkey wrote:
| Can relate so much to this. Noone will come once you have
| finished coding your product, you need a marketing strategy that
| is proven to work before you start coding a single line.
| vagab0nd wrote:
| I had 4 failed attempts to monetize side projects, before finally
| stumbling upon something that doesn't need marketing at all.
| However, it does require competing at the absolute top level,
| _all_ the time.
|
| What's the catch? You find these things almost exclusively in
| zero sum games. But since we are talking money here, as a solo
| dev I pick this over marketing, every single time.
| nlitened wrote:
| Do you mean crypto arbitrage?
| holler wrote:
| I've spent two years building a new social network idea that I
| wanted to use myself, and now that I'm finally feeling good about
| the site's development, I realize that the _real_ challenge
| begins - marketing. It's kind of daunting and I'm frequently
| thinking how I'd like to find a cofounder with business/marketing
| experience.
| laserlight wrote:
| Building first, marketing later is a gamble. Marketing is an
| activity that is conducted after product-market fit. Before
| that, there is customer development or business development.
| holler wrote:
| I agree, however in my case the motivation was to build
| something I myself want to use. It's been a long road to
| build it but I have found a small handful of organic users
| (almost entirely from Show HN post I did last Dec), who've
| said they really like it and continue to show up. However the
| dev process has been so long that I've frequently become
| disillusioned. I guess what I'm saying is that just the tech
| lift to build something can be immense, and yes there is then
| the gamble that you won't be able to find product-market fit.
| But sometimes you will never know unless you try.
| laserlight wrote:
| Right. It's perfectly fine to build something for yourself.
| And, why not test if there's any market for it.
| codegeek wrote:
| An extremely hard problem . As you can read from the post, he had
| to approach someone directly based on what they saw about them
| online. This requires you to be constantly looking around and
| reaching out to people yourself instead of a usual job post. In
| other words, you have to be selling (yourself and your company)
| to attract a potential co-founder in general.
|
| The challenge is that most good marketing people are either
| working at or running their own agency. The ones that you usually
| find either have no experience or are very raw which could be a
| gamble. Secondly, they have to really align with your vision and
| idea (a co-founder problem in general, not just related to
| marketing). All this makes it tough especially if you are
| bootstrapped and don't have a lot of money to play with.
| b20000 wrote:
| a long time problem I've had as a founder, is that I have never
| encountered a prospective co-founder who could do marketing, who
| is willing to just work for equity. everyone needs to pay their
| bills, and equity is not enough. the only exception is ultra rich
| people who are in it for fun, and are already rich because of a
| previous startup or a family with deep pockets. and those people
| you won't find unless you are already very well connected, which
| only happens if a) you can spend all your time networking instead
| of building a product b) you have a family that is ultra well
| connected / rich. in europe, I could never find someone who would
| work for just equity. so I moved to the US. then, I came to the
| conclusion that it's the same situation in the US, and location
| actually doesn't matter even though I was told it's all different
| in the US.
| b20000 wrote:
| hey, sorry for telling it like it is.
| nudpiedo wrote:
| You speak as if you would have any experience in that field to
| end up saying you never got any experience but someone told you
| the grass is greener elsewhere. Have you tried to actively
| network? I went to a few startup meetups in Germany, Taiwan,
| and Japan and always found such people, but usually they were
| involved in their own projects rather than looking for parters.
| b20000 wrote:
| what experience are you talking about? I have the actual
| experience of trying to bring in marketing/sales co-founders.
| also, read my comment. networking requires spending your time
| going to parties. if you are building a product, you have no
| time for networking.
| MrLeap wrote:
| Yes, I do.
| ibains wrote:
| First, product-marketing is the most important skill in forming a
| company. You might get lucky without it, but success rate will be
| low.
| 3Scribe wrote:
| Is there an award for "No shit Sherlock"?
| bwship wrote:
| I am a solo tech founder. I am fortunate I suppose that my
| product is something that fills an actual need. I get about
| 125-150 people to the site organically every day, with about 25
| people logging in, and then 1-3 people putting down their credit
| card for a trial. I feel like I did the real hard part and that
| while a marketing person might be able to hep increase these
| numbers, that if I keep on refining and bettering the product, I
| will solve for it myself. Maybe I am delusional, but at least I
| am having fun doing it!
| laserlight wrote:
| A marketer is of no use if nobody needs your product. This
| developer was lucky that he built something that people wanted.
| He just failed to reach them. He could have just hired a marketer
| with right incentives. No need for a co-founder in marketing. You
| need to talk to customers, which is not optional.
| blocked_again wrote:
| > A marketer is of no use if nobody needs your product
|
| That's the point of marketing. To mostly convince people to buy
| products that they don't need.
| laserlight wrote:
| Using need and want interchangeably was a mistake. First
| sentence should have read: A marketer is of no use if nobody
| _wants_ your product.
| holler wrote:
| I agree with that, and it depends on what you're building, but
| just having a second person to offload/distribute the
| marketing/growth work could be significant.
| laserlight wrote:
| There is no marketing or growth work until product-market
| fit. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to find a marketer as a
| cofounder. There could of course be a cofounder who is more
| focused on customer or business development.
| b20000 wrote:
| most products are things you don't need. look at facebook, you
| don't need that shit, yet you use it, and you want it. i would
| say that 80% of SV startups make things you don't need. they
| just think you need it, and throw a bunch of money at it to
| satisfy some ego or lifelong dream. a lot of things in life are
| things you want but not need. so the money is in making things
| people want, not need.
| laserlight wrote:
| Thanks for your clarification. First sentence should have
| read: A marketer is of no use if nobody wants your product.
| _benj wrote:
| This might the the case in B2C but wren in B2B a startup can
| make a product that paid for itself, say, improves a process
| or removes frictions or automated something or any other
| business needs that are tedious... that is a gold mine! Been
| looking but haven't found my gold mine yet...
| mettamage wrote:
| Amen. Glad to think I'm not the only one thinking this way.
| Seeing this comment, blockchain startups make a lot more
| sense :)
| dkersten wrote:
| Yeah, in my personal experience, the biggest problem in very
| early stage startups has always been figuring out what the
| right thing to build is, and actually building a version of it
| that people can use. Customer development and product
| development. If you build the wrong thing or you never actually
| get the thing built, any marketing effort is wasted effort.
|
| Nail those things first, then hire someone to do your
| marketing.
| holoduke wrote:
| I don't agree. Using the argument of 'i need to have a sales guy'
| is usually just saying your product isn't good enough. Before you
| downvote me. I have 2 successful companies and many failures.
| From those failures I I initially had the same statement. Give me
| a good marketing guy and I will conquer the world. Nonsense. You
| can do it yourself if the product is good
| aketchum wrote:
| I think one of the biggest failures of developers is thinking
| that tech means anything when launching a business. Tech that
| works is table stakes. If nobody knows about your product then it
| may as well not exists, from a business perspective. If you want
| to start a business, the marketing and customer acquisition
| strategies are as important (if not more important) than the
| tech. Someone has to make sure your potential customers know your
| solution exists. It can be the founder or it can be a VP of
| Growth, but it is a job that must be done or else you may as well
| not waste your time writing the code in the first place.
| adampk wrote:
| Even though Mr. Kan has since retracted this statement after
| Atrium failed I think it still stands:
|
| "First time founders are obsessed with product.
|
| Second time founders are obsessed with distribution."
|
| https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1059989657218248704?lan...
| lvl100 wrote:
| Marketing is one of the most overrated functions. You don't need
| a founder whose sole function is to hack marketing. It's a
| deadweight. There's a reason why there are so many unemployed
| MBAs. You're much better off finding someone who can do
| finance/accounting and market as an added bonus. Buying into
| someone who can only market is same as buying into a ponzi
| scheme.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| You are completely delusional.
| pembrook wrote:
| I remember my first beer.
|
| I've come to the realization that, no matter how much you try
| to share what you've learned with people, ultimately, everybody
| has to learn things for themselves the hard way.
|
| A great example of this is stock marketing investing. No matter
| how much data and information is provided upfront, it will
| never be enough to overcome the classic noob belief of "I'm
| going to get rich day trading!" If I think back, 18 year old me
| could not be told otherwise.
|
| It's the same with technical people (engineers, designers, etc)
| who start businesses for the first time.
|
| No matter how much data you give them that _market_ and
| _distribution_ are the most important things in any business
| (not your code or your design), they will ignore it and say
| things like "Marketing is deadweight!"
|
| Exactly what specialized finance and accounting knowledge do
| you think will come in handy during the first 2 years before
| you even hit $10k MRR?
|
| Is this finance/accounting wizard going to conduct a _Double
| Irish_ to save on the 73 cents in taxes you owe?
| lvl100 wrote:
| You're assuming that "technical" people, as you call them,
| cannot be great at marketing. If you're only "good" at
| marketing that means you have no skills and in fact you self-
| select not to learn anything. That is a deadweight in any
| organization. It's 2021. You should be able to wear multiple
| hats as a founder.
| ezekg wrote:
| Great read. If only finding a co-founder wasn't so hard. And also
| -- this website is great! Looks like Indie Hackers before it
| transformed into Product Hunt 2.0.
| dgb23 wrote:
| It's great this worked for them!
|
| But I don't see a comparison to the obvious counter argument that
| you could hire marketing instead.
| codegeek wrote:
| If you are bootstrapped, it is extremely tough especially in
| the early days to hire good talent in general. Hence the co-
| founder thing. But even if you are past initial stages but
| bootstrapped, it is tough to compete with VC money to pay big
| and attract really good candidates. That is the unfortunate
| reality.
| raunometsa wrote:
| You could, if you have money for it. Plausible's MRR was $146
| at the time.
| bengale wrote:
| Yeah, we saw the real start of our growth when we hired a
| dedicated sales and marketing person. They didn't take any
| equity and they weren't even that expensive (ignoring
| commission). I'm not sure it would have made sense to bring
| them on as a co-founder.
| Jensson wrote:
| Why get a marketing co-founder instead of a business co-founder?
| I feel as if marketing have marketed their own profession to such
| a degree that people believe they have super powers.
| system2 wrote:
| Unfortunately, majority of "marketers" are hungry people who
| don't really know much about real marketing. This might offend
| the real marketers (hungry part) but it is true.
|
| I worked with countless e-commerce companies who hired these
| "marketers" and failed miserably. I would say 1 in 100 marketers
| really knows what they are doing. Majority of these fake
| marketers think having Instagram their phone gives them the
| marketer status and posting on Instagram is what marketing is.
| They do not know, they keep using crappy buzzwords. It is much
| more (nearly impossible) to benchmark marketers' talent until
| spending $$$ for their 6-12 months salary. It is much more easier
| to find a developer because they do not need to lie about their
| talent, you can just check their work and see the quality.
|
| Fake marketers can disguise their fakery so easily because it is
| just words until really working with them. When I say 1 in 100, I
| am really being optimistic. As a developer I had to teach maybe
| 100+ "marketers" how to use google analytics. That's how
| miserable they are. It is not my fault these ecommerce companies
| hire fake marketers because job market is full of them and they
| lie very nicely. Their career is job hopping every 6 months and
| find new companies to lie to them instead of really learning
| marketing.
|
| If I can find someone like marcosaric to make my graphs look like
| theirs, I would happily give one of my kidneys. It is so rare. So
| rare.
| lvl100 wrote:
| I'd add marketing for startup is not the same as marketing for
| big corp. And skills are rarely transferable. But if you're
| looking to add a marketing specialist to your team, you're
| inevitably going to look at someone with established history at
| a big corp marketing.
| brianwawok wrote:
| It's true.
|
| Also a lot of developers are really bad. They can maybe write
| specs if given to them, but not always. Let's say 1/100 devs
| can write good code and create ideas.
|
| Sounds like we have a 1/100 x 1/100 chance of forming a good
| startup ;)
| throwaway158497 wrote:
| >> "marketers" are hungry people who don't really know much
| about real marketing.
|
| Funnily , good marketer just markets himself, not the product
| :) Whenever I pick up some marketing book and wonder all the
| great stuff they put in its description, I wonder, if the
| person is really good at marketing or they are just good at
| promoting themselves. Thus, I concluded that I can't learn much
| from these "great" marketers.
| XCSme wrote:
| > good marketer just markets himself, not the product
|
| This is why I don't think I can hire good marketers and
| always failed when I tried to do so. If someone is a good
| enough marketer, they don't even need a product to sell, they
| can just sell anything or nothing.
| Jensson wrote:
| The best marketers becomes top influencers, they don't need
| help people come to them and pay them to market stuff.
| throwaway39490 wrote:
| I'm not a fan of how Plausible seems to straight up copy
| everything that Fathom does. From features to announcements to
| landing pages. I could imagine copy-cats are hard to deal with as
| founders, but man, it seems like Plausible copies every little
| thing Fathom does. That isn't to detract from Plausible's
| success, which is undeniable and impressive in and of itself, but
| it has always irked me.
|
| p.s. I'm a Fathom customer, so take this as you will. Obviously
| biased.
| brianwawok wrote:
| 5 years into a bootstrap, yup. this is true.
|
| The good news is, with the dev side covered.. I have an actual
| product to sell, and have actual paying clients. Without dev I
| would have nothing to sell (reskinned sugar water I guess?). But
| I am seeing the limits of what a crappy $35 theme website can
| sell. Onwards and upwards!
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Going through this exact same situation myself. No, developing
| the app is not the hardest part. If you build it, they won't
| come. Much better to hire/find a cofounder with a marketing
| background instead of YOLOing money into the advertising dumpster
| fire as you learn how it works.
| mojuba wrote:
| Same. It might also be that developers aren't great at finding
| co-founders either. I tried YC's Co-founder Match and connected
| with some amazing people who promised to help in some capacity.
| They all loved the idea, approved the pitch deck (and helped me
| improve it too) but none of them committed to being a business
| co-founder. I have no idea what's wrong!
| candiddevmike wrote:
| My experience with cofounder match is mostly founders with an
| idea/startup and a cesspool of recent or in progress college
| grads looking for a job. Finding someone without an idea,
| real experience, and responds to messages is like finding a
| unicorn.
| mojuba wrote:
| My experience was much better than that definitely. A lot
| of amazing business people, some requesting me to join
| them, some responding to my requests (about 30-40% response
| rate I'd say). Some former successful founders looking for
| something new, too.
| egfx wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. I've had several money and marketing
| oriented people reach out and that sounds nice but the
| alkalis heel is the commitment. Your deadlines are not
| they're deadlines etc. That's the thing about these marketing
| and people oriented cofounders, they're jumpy.
|
| Another thing is that with most people on YC match-mate is
| your most often being used as a listening post to whatever
| they're working on not vice versa.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| I think the problem is that a startup is a far riskier
| proposal for a marketer than a dev. For devs we have a safety
| net in the most insane job market the world has ever known.
| Launching a failed startup is almost a right of passage for
| us.
|
| On the marketing side, finding a job after failure is
| drastically harder, and you'll be set back years in your
| career since there's a lot more ladder climbing involved in
| marketing departments. By contrast launching a startup is a
| pretty solid way to jump your career from mid-level to senior
| dev.
| LanceJones wrote:
| Not for some of us. Really good marketers know how to
| market themselves.
| ageyfman wrote:
| I was in the same situation. My co-founder and I split
| responsibilities and I moved into a sales role. It was
| difficult at first, but like anything, learnable.
| 72f988bf wrote:
| Exactly, "if you build it, they'll come" is the worst advice
| for startups.
|
| Of course, if you don't build it, nobody will come.
|
| But the real difficult part, and there's plenty of startup
| literature on the subject, is DISTRIBUTION. That's where the
| marketing & sales skills comes into play.
| lancesells wrote:
| As someone that works as a marketing consultant for different
| eCommerce companies it's the same thing. The product might
| actually be really good but it's typically going to be
| crickets without some sort of distribution.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| To be honest both parts are pretty hard. Getting a startup or
| even just a small SaaS business working is like a series of AND
| logic gates, all of which are pretty hard and must be done to a
| somewhat decent degree for it to work
| armagon wrote:
| Any recommendations for how a developer can learn a useful amount
| of marketing?
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I'd say that "sales" or "marketing" are indeed valuable skills
| that developers may lack, but I think you would be doing yourself
| a disfavor if you're only looking for those skills.
|
| In the end, what I myself realized, is that the real gap is not
| just sales/marketing; it's about someone that figures out
| product-market fit. It's somewhat sales, it's somewhat marketing,
| it's somewhat strategic. But an average marketeer or sales
| representative will have a terribly difficult time figuring out
| PMF.
| hcal wrote:
| As always it depends on a lot of things, but anyone with a
| background marketing should be pretty versed in product-market
| fit. It is a fundamental concept to marketing in the same way
| double-entry bookkeeping is fundamental to accounting... I'm
| sure there are a bunch of people calling themselves marketers
| who are really just sales drones, but there are also a lot of
| developers who are just spaghetti coders and accountants who
| are really just glorified filers and data entry specialists.
| Jensson wrote:
| > anyone with a background marketing should be pretty versed
| in product-market fit. It is a fundamental concept to
| marketing in the same way double-entry bookkeeping is
| fundamental to accounting.
|
| It isn't though, marketers aren't experts in understanding if
| a product is worth building. Some become experts at that, but
| it isn't a standard part of their job. Instead find people
| who are experts in product design or just regular business,
| they will likely be better at this than marketers and could
| do the marketing bits as well.
|
| It feels as if developers do the same mistake here as they
| accuse others of. Even a developer can learn marketing, so
| why not make a product designer learn marketing? Its just
| useful to have another person on the team who takes care
| about product market fit etc, looking for a marketer for that
| role just limits who you can find.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Maybe, I would just look for qualities of finding PMF over
| marketing qualities. Getting a startup's product strategy in
| the right direction is something entirely different than
| "just" marketing; it means understanding how to change the
| product based on lack of demand, and understanding it is, in
| fact, a product problem rather than a marketing problem.
|
| I'm sure great marketeers qualify for these traits, but if
| that's the case, why not just select for these traits in the
| first place, rather than marketing?
| clairity wrote:
| yes, there are many skills needed to get a startup off the
| ground (and a whole heapin' of luck), and lumping them vaguely
| like "sales/marketing" doesn't help. you need to be able to
| recognize (first) potential customers, find them with leverage
| that far exceeds the labor input, study how/why they become
| customers, foresee market and other risks, distill all that
| into strategy and features, sell these distillations to others,
| including cofounders, investors, and customers, orchestrate a
| reasonable development plan, forecast the future reasonably,
| and do this over and over again.
| anderson1993 wrote:
| Marketing is the entire game once you get your product/service to
| where you believe it should be.
| metadata wrote:
| It's not only about skills - it's about focus.
|
| At one point I (as a bootstrapped solopreneur, profitable for a
| long time) decided the bottleneck in my career is not technical
| ability or features. I sorely lacked business depth, marketing
| and sales skills. In shifting my focus, I read a ton of books and
| learned about SEO, email marketing, PPC, lean startup, etc.
|
| It turned out that I managed to fare even worse than before.
| Instead of having stellar products with lousy marketing - I
| spread myself thin by adding marketing on top of development,
| customer support, website maintenance etc. If I were able to find
| a cofounder I like, someone with deep knowledge of the niche we
| are in (databases), with great work ethics and presence in
| database communities, it might well be one of the best things for
| the business. I would focus on the technical side, that person
| would be the bridge to the community.
|
| It's hard to find someone with deep database knowledge who wants
| to be a marketing and community building cofounder. These people
| are paid a lot for their expertise. With more money now, I am
| focusing on being the architect and write more, with my team
| handling the development more and more.
|
| So yes, it would be good to have a cofounder. It may simply be
| too hard to find a person with complementary skillset to join, so
| we developers have to keep paddling until we reach a point where
| we have enough time to focus on marketing. Or, simply hire a
| great marketer with good track record in our industry. Money
| fixes many problems.
| padseeker wrote:
| Ugh this one hurts. I'm a developer whose launched something I'm
| quite proud of but flailing at the marketing end. I've even been
| on the front page of Hacker News. I can write code till the cows
| come home but I've agonized over content and marketing and the
| proper way to market and promote the app.
|
| FYI if you're at all curious the app is called Keenforms, it's a
| form builder with a no code rules engine.
|
| https://www.keenforms.com
| agustif wrote:
| https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/content-marketing
|
| This is a good resource
| jimaek wrote:
| I think most technical solo founders know they need a co-founder
| with expertise in marketing and sales, the problem is actually
| finding them.
|
| I definitely could use one but it's been impossible to find
| someone both serious about it and experienced at the same time.
| Especially if you're based in Europe.
| bwship wrote:
| This is amazing. My wife was just telling my I need someone to
| do my marketing and sales. And I am like, yes I know this, but
| it is way easier said than done. Thus why I am still grinding
| on it as a solo tech founder.
| ezekg wrote:
| Yep, agreed. I've been looking for over 2 years and haven't
| been able to find someone who's a good fit.
| libertine wrote:
| Out of curiosity what are the things that you look for in a
| marketer?
| XCSme wrote:
| I had the same experience and gave up on trying to find a co-
| founder in marketing. The only ones that I found were
| freelancers that provided a questionable quality kind of
| marketing.
| michaelje wrote:
| It's funny to hear this from the technical side. It resonates
| so strongly, because I'm in the same but polar opposite boat.
|
| Marketing day job for over a decade, but after spending far too
| long trying to find the technical partner I've built a
| functional MVP and got it in the hands of demo users thru
| TestFlight.
|
| It's 100% not efficient use of my time. I would always rather
| find a technical partner - but the alternative of standing
| still while you search is too frustrating.
|
| Surely plenty of private/community slacks out there to connect
| the two..?
| throwdecro wrote:
| > I've built a functional MVP and got it in the hands of demo
| users thru TestFlight
|
| Well done!
| enumjorge wrote:
| > Surely plenty of private/community slacks out there to
| connect the two..?
|
| The challenge is finding an effective barrier of entry so
| that you are connecting people on both sides who are serious.
|
| Out of curiosity how did you build your MVP? Did you learn to
| code or did use no code tools or something similar?
| nmm wrote:
| Congrats on the MVP!
|
| Did you have a hard time convincing users to sign up for
| TestFlight? If so, how'd you overcome it?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I thought so, too. But nowadays I believe you actually need a
| product manager. Because if you have stuff that people really
| want/need, they will actively google for it and find you. The
| big issue is that your opinion of what the market wants is most
| certainly wrong. So you need a product manager who will
| interview prospective customers, analyze the market, and advise
| you on which product to build. Once you have a value-generating
| product, marketing will be easy enough that you can outsource
| it.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| This kind of magical thinking about product-led growth is
| unfortunately as naive as it is common.
| mikesabbagh wrote:
| I second this. I tried to find a marketing cofounder for the
| past year. All I got is fresh graduates with little experience
| or skills. And covid does not help.
|
| if you are an experienced marketer and interested in hosting
| business and serverless, please contact me
| t0mas88 wrote:
| It may help if you add some contact details in your profile
| ;)
| Avalaxy wrote:
| Yup. All I ever found was freeloaders who don't put in nearly
| the same effort. Serious business people who will relentlessly
| try to get feedback, sell the product and make deals are pretty
| rare. But when you have one, it's worth gold.
| leetrout wrote:
| I have witnessed this exact thing at several startups. It is
| demoralizing. Especially when they have >1% equity and you're
| lucky as a dev if you have >.1%
| ecf wrote:
| Sales + Marketing routinely have commission as well when
| it's normally unheard of for devs to be included in profit
| sharing.
| friedman23 wrote:
| It's the same problem with finding developers to work for
| your early stage startup. Actual good sales people and
| marketers are in high demand everywhere. Finding one that
| will be committed enough as you is hard when they are
| fielding offers from established companies that are much
| easier to sell.
| conjectures wrote:
| I think the lesson is that competence is scarce.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| Why not learn how to market yourself? You may not become the
| greatest marketer in the world but you almost certainly can
| be competent in less than a year.
|
| Then if you grow whatever project big enough, you can then
| just hire someone. And you'd actually know how to manage them
| with insight into their job.
| cutemonster wrote:
| A startup with 2 people, one of them a marketer, can get
| twice as much done -- marketing can easily be a full time
| job.
|
| A single person could easily get out completed? Even if
| s/he is able to learn "everything" eventually
|
| Otherwise, I agree with you
| hikerclimber1 wrote:
| Everything is subjective. Especially laws.
| ghaff wrote:
| You mention sales. The OP is IMO perhaps overly focused on
| marketing, which is part of the mix certainly, but sales,
| setting up partnerships, establishing relationships with media
| (either directly or, more likely, by hiring an agency), etc.
| Marketing plays into all this but, depending on the needs, even
| an experienced marketing person may not have the right mix of
| skills by themselves.
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